Memorial Service for Ernie Banks

By The Associated Press

Jan. 31, 2015

Fans and friends paid tribute to the Chicago Cubs slugger Ernie Banks on Saturday, recalling how he helped break baseball’s color barrier during a Hall of Fame career in which he won over his teammates and a city with the unwavering optimism he brought to the game and life.

At a memorial service in a Chicago church, the buoyant man known as Mr. Cub was remembered for his character as much as his accomplishments as a player, including his 512 home runs. Speaker after speaker recalled Banks’s unflagging optimism and good cheer — he enthusiastically predicted each spring that his team would win the pennant — as well as his humility and regard for others.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Banks “disarmed adversaries with optimism” and “branded good will.” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Banks was a “humble hero” who taught younger generations “how to play the game of life.” His fellow Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins said the unassuming Banks strove to be a good teammate, not a star.

Saturday would have been Banks’s 84th birthday, and several speakers called on the crowd to celebrate his life, not mourn his passing. Banks, a two-time National League most valuable player, a military veteran and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died Jan. 23 of a heart attack. His coffin, which was in front of the alter, was draped in a banner emblazoned with his jersey number, 14. A choir performed a rousing version of “This Little Light of Mine.”

Jackson began by getting everyone to stand up and then leading them in a rousing round of applause to celebrate Banks’s birthday. Jackson noted that it was also the 150th anniversary of Congress’s passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. “Smiling faces can sometimes conceal what’s deep within,” Jackson said, describing Banks’s cheerfulness as a thermostat that “helped control the temperature” of his times.

Banks was the Cubs’ first black player when he joined the team in 1953, six years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Banks suffered the same racial taunts and indignities as other black players of his time, but if he ever got angry, he never seemed to show it. Emanuel noted that in Banks’s early years with the Cubs, Jim Crow laws kept him from staying at some of the hotels and eating at the same restaurants as his white teammates. But in a 19-year career full of amazing statistics, one of the most remarkable was that he was never ejected from a game.

Roosevelt Johnson, 45, arrived at Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church at 5:30 a.m. and was first in line. “I wanted to pay my respects to a true icon of the sport,” said Johnson, of Zion, Ill. He added that Banks’s charm and the genuine interest he showed in others, always making eye contact, made him special.

■ The Baltimore Orioles’ president for baseball operations, Dan Duquette, said “there was substance” to reports that the Toronto Blue Jays had pursued him to be club president. Duquette’s job involves working trades for the Orioles, but this off-season he was the subject of a potential swap. Because he is under contract with Baltimore through 2018, the Blue Jays had to offer Baltimore ample compensation to secure his services. No deal was made with Duquette, who was talking about Orioles baseball at the team’s FanFest. He said Toronto’s pursuit had not hindered his goal of improving the defending champions of the American League East.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section SP, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Memorial Service for Banks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe